In the framework of a conference sponsored by the network of European Centres of African Studies, a workshop on Literary Approaches to FGM would be highly appropriate at this time of increasing interest in a harmful traditional practice that has spread with the African diaspora. Although the custom we will discuss is also known as female circumcision or female genital cutting, the preferred term FGM (female genital mutilation) has been codified in World Health Assembly Resolution WHA46.18 and other international instruments, including documents approved during the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, China, September 1995 (WHO J2) and is the designation of choice for the Inter-African Committee based in Addis Ababa and Geneva.
This panel features experts in literary fields who are both academics and activists. We will answer the question: what has our discipline contributed toward better understanding of the various practices involved? What has our scholarship contributed to campaigns against the practice? Each speaker will look at initiatives in African and European nations.
When in 1955 Ngugo wa Thiong’o published The River Between, no organized movement against FGM existed. This did not stop isolated – and courageous -- indigenous voices from being raised against the practice but the fact of sporadic colonial insistence on its abandonment opened African opponents to charges of co-optation. Ngugi wa Thiong’o, making the female ‘circumcision’ controversy symbolize a nexus of emotion for and against, explores whether in fact Jomo Kenyatta was right in calling this particular sexual practice the sine qua non for a stable social unit divided into women and men.
Although Ngugi can be read as envisioning the day when Kikuyu girls would no longer face the knife, his drama dignifies both sides, proponents and antagonists, with the satirical thrust if anything more on the side of abolitionists. If his heroine Dura dies as a result of her wish to 'become a woman in the tribe,' the implication is that she made her own choice, especially since her Christian father disapproves. Without encouragement, therefore, she espouses traditional, if painful, ways and receives her author’s sympathy. When Alice Walker picks up the theme a generation later, ambivalence fades. Here a heroine also chooses, as a patriotic gesture, to conform to inherited behavior; she doesn’t die as a result but her younger sister had, a death repressed by the protagonist, Tashi, who unearths the memory in psychotherapy. And now this death is unambiguous: it should never have happened. What a misguided gesture it therefore was to feel, as Tashi did, that because colonization had advanced to such a degree, any remaining customs should be adhered to as a matter of course. In fact, as Tashi learns, the lesson of the future is quite the opposite – break with custom. Shed the old ways. Introduce new, ground-breaking, gendered behaviours. Reflect the fact that humanity exceeds a binary structure. 'Resistance is the secret of joy.' Which, then, of the two approaches can best be enlisted in anti-FGM campaigns?
As of February 2005, seven nations have ratified the 'Maputo Protocol' to the African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights to amplify the Rights of Women in Africa, guaranteeing protection from harmful customs and gender-based violence. Adopted by the African Union at a summit in Mozambique in July 2003, it has been welcomed by activists and may well have encouraged a lively showing – better, perhaps, a show-down -- at the sub-regional conference "Towards a political and religious consensus on FGM" in Djibouti (February 2005). As reported in La Nation, « les femmes Djiboutiennes fond plier les religieux » (http://www.lanation.dj): Djibouti women make the clerics cede… Activist Els Leye, who was there, describes the emotional plenary session: “After two days of deliberations, [regional clerics] did not [agree] on the total rejection of all forms of FGM. [Their] statement declared [opposition to] … pharaonic …, but [insisted] they had to allow for ‘sunna’” (email to the European Network against Harmful Traditional Practices especially FGM, 8 February 2005). Yet, as Minister of Religious Affairs M. Mogueh Dirir Samatar was reading, “women started shouting, knocking on … desks and [making] such a noise that the Minister could not make himself heard...! Some religious leaders left the plenary. But women did not give up; they continued shouting NO!” Several minutes passed before Minister Mogueh Dirir Samatar took the microphone again to announce that the clerics were withdrawing their Statement. Instead, “ALL FORMS OF FGM [were to be] rejected. Participants started shouting again, but now for joy! People were dancing, crying and applauding…”
What a contrast to the earlier treatment of FGM in francophone literature. For instance, Aminata Maia Ka in La Voie du salut [The Road to Health] (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1985) touches briefly on the theme when a three-month old undergoes clitoridectomy and dies. The novel shows passive parents resigned to the generosity or malfeasance of God: « Dieu nous a donné ce bébé, il nous l’a repris. L’excision n’a été qu’une des milles voies par lesquelles s’est accomplie la volonté du Seigneur ! » (p. 23, quoted in Pierrette Herzberger-Fofana. Littérature féminine francophone d’Afrique noire. Paris : L’Harmattan, 2000. 211) God gave us the child and took her away. Excision was only one of a thousand ways this could have happened.
Acquiesence, however, is not the only possible response. In her 1998 novel Rebelle, Fatou Keita anticipates the Djibouti ‘uprising’ by nearly a decade, her heroine Malimouna leading opposition both in the Ivory Coast and in Paris. Malimouna’s Association aims not only to increase women’s literacy but also to “lancer une vaste campagne de lutte contre les violences subies par les femmes” (189), this catalogue of abuse understood theoretically to proceed from FGM, “violences qui, disait-elle, partaient de l’excision” (189). This talk privileges Keita’s engagement, as a novelist, against FGM, viewed against a background of awareness of varying degrees within female and male African francophone fiction.
Since the beginning of the 1990s texts about „female genital mutilation“ (FGM) or as I prefer to call it, Female Genital Cutting (FGC), have been published in large numbers. Literary criticism constitutes only a small part of these publications. While fiction that concerns itself with FGC has received moderate attention, the study of autobiographical writings about FGC is still marginalized in academia which may be at least partly due to the fact that many scholars do not consider these works to be literature and thus not worthy of attention. The situation in the literary market, in contrast, is quite different. Autobiographical texts by African women who have experienced FGC (for example the writings of Fauziya Kassindja or Waris Dirie) have sold well and reached a wide audience. During the past years, two autobiographical texts that address FGC have been published by Somali immigrants living in Germany: Nura Abdi’s Tränen im Sand (2003) and Fadumo Korn’s Geboren im Großen Regen: Mein Leben zwischen Afrika und Deutschland (2004).
Reading these two autobiographical texts is a contradictory experience that parallels the often equally contradictory experience of being a scholar and activist working on the complicated issue of FGC. On the one hand, it is of uttermost importance that African women talk about the pain of FGC from their own perspectives and reclaim dignity, especially in a country such as Germany where critical (in the sense of sensitive and anti-racist) perspectives on the issue of FGC are still rare. Furthermore, both texts serve activist purposes in that they encourage other African women to speak out on FGC and list names of German NGOs fighting against FGC. In that they provide very detailed accounts about their childhood and family life in Somalia as well as customs and traditions, Abdi’s and Korn’s stories play a crucial role in conveying information about what FGC is like in the eyes of those who practice it. Because of their focus on the cultural background of FGC in Somalia, I argue that these autobiographical texts can be read as auto-ethnographies. I use „auto-ethnography“ in the sense of an ethnographic presentation of oneself by a subject usually considered the ‚object‘ of ‚traditional‘ ethnography. As such it is a form of autobiography being deployed to renegotiate subject positions in writing (Watson 1997). Key concerns of auto-ethnographic writing are questions of identity and selfhood, voice and authenticity as well as cultural displacement and exile, all of which play a major role in the texts by Nura Abdi and Fadumo Korn.
On the other hand, these two texts raise the issue of authorship which is central to most autobiographical texts about FGC as they are frequently not exlusively written by the authors themselves or are legitimated by means of a foreword written by a respectable White person. Abdi’s text was co-authored by a White male Leo Linder while Korn’s text is preceded by a foreword from Karlheinz Böhm, a prominant German actor and Chairman of Menschen für Menschen, a major German NGO in the development field, as well as an advocate in the struggle against FGC. The practice of co-authorship exhibits similarities to a specifically U.S. American form of autobiographical writing, the slave narrative, which often bore a „frame“ or preface attesting to its authenticity and to the sufferings described within. This observation is compounded by the fact that the two autobiographical texts exhibit a narrative structure typical of the classical slave narrative. The purpose of these narratives was to arouse the sympathy of White readers in order to promote humanitarianism. Moreover, slave narratives similar to captivity narratives are also known for a narrative pattern that traces the protagonist’s development from a state of protected innocence to a confrontation with the evil of slavery and captivity. The narratives frequently end with the flight of the protagonist and the rendering of her experience to a public eager to hear sensational stories of horror and violence. Both of the autobiographical texts by Abdi and Korn follow this line of narration in that they detail the protagonists protected childhood in Somalia, their experience of infibulation which disrupts their lives, their final flight to security and freedom in the liberated Western world - in this case Germany - and their coming-to-consciousness and participation in activism against FGC.
The problematic of authorship just outlined questions wide-spread beliefs that assume auto-ethnographies to be more „authentic“ than straight ethnography (Reed-Danahay 1997). The obvious remnants of colonialism in the two texts under investigation raise questions about the danger of appropriation of these stories by Whites as well as the question in what ways these autobiographies may cater to a White audience eager to hear stories of barbaric practices and, in the process of doing so, reinforce racist stereotypes about FGC especially since both authors use terminology that many African women may find offensive. For example, when Korn talks about the „barbaric“ nature of FGC practices she may unwillingly contribute to what Chandra Mohanty has termed the „third world difference“, i.e., a view of African women as victims of barbaric patriarchal practices, while Western women emerge as liberated subjects able to enjoy their sexuality. African women, once more, are reduced to their status as „mutilated“, even though this is exactly what both authors are trying to write against when they attempt to present themselves as persons and not just „mutilated genitals“.
“Writing is like dissection,” the Egyptian physician and fiction writer Nawal El Sadaawi states in an 1986 interview. The socio-critical objective she attributes to creative writing is certainly prominent in the literary texts dealing with female genital excision, including her own. Over the past four decades, various African and African-American authors, men and women from all corners of the African continent and diaspora, have engaged in the international debate on excision, never just dealing with the practice in its own right, but also using it to explore broader socio-cultural issues, such as (de)colonisation, national repression, misogyny, feminism, human rights, globalisation. By focusing on how the campaign against excision has been constructed in fiction since the 1960s, this paper examines the aesthetical and/or political merits of these literary contributions to debate on excision.